


Dutch Angle

by infrarad



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Ben Solo is big, Cohabitation, Dysfunctional Family, EPIX WEPIX, F/M, Past Sexual Harassment, Rey Needs A Hug, Slow Burn, and they were roommates!, channeling spirits of interviewers who died of thirst trying to describe his bigness, minor ethical concerns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:34:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22155202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infrarad/pseuds/infrarad
Summary: Rey Johnson never thought she’d get to go to college, but here she is, fresh out of Job Corps, trying not to fail out of a required humanities course. Ben Solo, ex-industry film instructor, never thought he’d end up in academia, and he hates almost every single second of it. Both of these idiots have deep, dark secrets they'd rather the other one didn't learn. Will they succeed in keeping each other out of their business and/or pants? Hmm, better read to be sure....
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 17
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to MrsMancuspia and VioletHoure666 for their invaluable feedback <3

“I got a 98% on my first English quiz,” Rose says as she slings her backpack onto her bed. Rey follows her into her dorm room, closing the door behind her. Rose’s room is painted a pleasant shade of regulation lilac, the walls bedecked in fairy lights and posters of famous female astronauts. Her roommate, whom Rey has yet to meet, has a Dirty Dancing poster on the closet door and dirty laundry piled up on her desk.

Rey wanders over to the bay window, the crowning feature of the room. “That’s great, Rose. I told you there was no reason to worry.”

“Imagine me not worrying,” says Rose, laughing as she stretches out on the bed. She yawns massively.

Rey looks out over the campus, at the bookstore across the street, the student activities center, the gym that looks like it was built to withstand aerial attacks. The sky is aggressively blue, the sun’s heat an assault on bare skin. Rey thinks she’s never seen greener grass than the lawn of the dorm.

“What about you? Thermodynamics improving at all?”

“It’s really basic,” says Rey, turning to lower herself into a cheap butterfly chair that she fears might collapse beneath her. “Really really basic but the professor won’t bump me up to the next level. Fluid properties are fascinating, yeah, but not really at this level.”

“Maybe you can convince him to make you a TA?”

Rey frowns. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“You could always try,” says Rose. “I bet you could get money for it.“

“Maybe.” Rey is not convinced. “I’ll ask. Although I have no idea what a TA does.”

Rose rolls onto her back, laughing. “Aside from sit in the front row and suck up to the professor? Or lead a truly shitty discussion section?”

“Hux  _ is _ truly shitty, I won’t lie,” Rey says. “That reminds me,” she adds, suddenly perking up. “You know how Intro is taught by like five different professors?”

“Three, but go on.”

As part of her general education requirements, Rey had been advised to enroll in a writing intensive course that doubled as humanities credit. Neither of these prospects are in her wheelhouse; Rey transferred in as a junior into the mechanical engineering program. But here she is, barely three weeks into the semester, already struggling through endless slides and readings in Introduction to Film. Rose is a junior in the aerospace engineering program -- which was how she knows Rey, as both of their degree programs are housed in the same department -- but she’s minoring in film studies and knows most of the professors and graduate students.

“Well, Dr. Ackbar lectured all last week and this week, and Hux was supposed to lead the discussion today, but he was -- I don’t know, out sick? But instead they had a substitute.”

“Who was it? Was it Kaydel?”

“No, she does another discussion section at the same time. It was a coincidence, though -- it was one of my regulars at the pub.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Erm.”

Rey pauses. The substitute was… not what she expected a professor to look like. Dr. Ackbar?  _ That _ ’s a professor. Wizened, bald, and jowly, with stooped shoulders and coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes look enormous, he shuffles in and out of class with a coffee mug that looks like it’s never been washed and delivers his lectures as if he’d memorized and forgotten them every semester for decades running. He makes deliberately bad jokes and gets upset when students didn’t laugh.

But Professor Solo --  _ Benjamin  _ Solo, as she discovered later on the departmental website -- looked nothing like an academic. 

“Well, he’s got this… facial scar,” says Rey, and Rose’s eyebrows shoot up in recognition.

“Professor Solo! Yeah, he’s pretty new to the department. Just started last year, I think?”

“Oh, so you’ve had a class with him?”

“Yeah, he taught the film theory class. It was intense. But you said he’s one of your regulars?”

“He came in every week over the summer,” says Rey. “It’s weird -- we never get academics at the pub. Strictly a townie place, I don’t know why.”

“Because it’s not a pub,” Rose cackles. “It’s a bar, Rey. A dive bar. The Hairy Dog isn’t  _ nearly _ bougie enough for the profs.”

Rey can only assume Rose is right. Rose, who’s just started her third year in this town, is apparently on a first name basis with all the bartenders inside city limits. But beside the point, even if the Hairy Dog  _ did  _ attract more of the university crowd, she never would have placed Dr. Solo as a prof.

He’s just so… big.

Even hunched over a table, she could tell he’s huge. Massive shoulders, hands that dwarf a pint glass. She had guessed he was in construction, maybe a mechanic or something, especially with the scar, a thin but deep track which ran from above his brow all the way down his face to disappear into his collar.

And he’s quiet. She knows most of the regulars pretty well by now, but this guy… well, he’s always kept to himself. He never sits at the bar, but picks the corner table where he could keep his eye on whatever game they were screening above the bar. He favors wheat beers, nothing too fruity, but he avoids hops, which struck her as interesting. In her experience, the really macho guys were all about hops. It had piqued her curiosity when she first noticed it about him.

She shies away from the thought that his avoidance of hops wasn’t the only thing that piqued her curiosity.

“Well, did he recognize you?” Rose wants to know after a moment.

Rey shrugs. “I don’t know.”

She really doesn’t. She’d avoided speaking up in the discussion section, and while he’d held her gaze for a long moment when they happened to make eye contact, it was still just subtle enough that she couldn’t quite tell if it meant anything.

“He’s supposed to be co-teaching the intro course,” Rose says. “At least that’s what Poe said. He’s a good lecturer, and unlike the other profs teaching that course, he actually gives a fuck. Be glad he’s not grading your papers, though.”

“Why, is he tough?”

Rose shudders. “The toughest. I’m not kidding, Rey. He made me revise my final paper five times before he was satisfied.”

Rey blanches. “Oh my god.”

“I mean, he gave me an A. He just wouldn’t let me be done with it until  _ he _ thought it was perfect.”

“Good to know,” Rey says.

Rose sits up. “I’m starving. C’mon, let’s get dinner.” Rey’s on the verge of declining when Rose insists, “I’ll swipe you in. It’s loaded baked potato night!”

Rey can't argue with that.

*

Rey doesn’t see Solo for the next couple of weeks. He hadn’t been to the pub since the beginning of the semester, and except for the one discussion section he’d stood in for, he wasn’t scheduled to lecture for World Cinema until the fourth week. Rey doesn’t think about it much, except occasionally when she’s working a Thursday or Friday night at the Hairy Dog. It’s not an intrusive thought, just the question each night: is tonight the night he’s going to walk in that door?

She does her best to put it out of her mind. She has other things to worry about, such as picking up more shifts, so she can at least afford to eat food that’s not scavenged from the kitchen when the line cook’s busy flirting with the waitress.

She’s put him mostly out of her mind by the evening she walks into the bar late one Wednesday to pick up her check, and that’s when she spots him. There in the partitioned-off area Maz calls the party room, at a couple of pushed-together tables surrounded by ten or twelve grad students, is Professor Solo, looking like the most reluctant king to hold court. Despite how big he is, he's doing his best to reduce his bulk, hunched over the table, one arm crossed over his chest so he can grip his opposite shoulder, his chin tucked in as he listens to one of his students talking animatedly.

“Rey! You just can't stay away from me, can you?”

Finn blazes past with a tray of shots, headed to a big circular table of sorority girls in the corner. 

“Dream on, you arse,” says Rey fondly.

When she glances back into the party room, she finds Solo staring at her, his eyes black and unreadable. She feels pinned down until, with a quick lift of his eyebrows, he seems to beckon her over.

She doesn’t know why she obeys, doesn’t think to question it, but slips between the maze of tables until she stands at his elbow. 

Around him, his students’ voices have risen to a collective roar, but he is still. When he speaks, though, she can hear him as clearly as if his were the only voice there. 

“We'd take a pitcher of the wheat,” he begins. 

“Oh!”

_ Of course. _ He thinks she’s working. What had she expected, that he… wanted to talk with her? She fights down the disappointment and smiles. “Sorry, I'm actually not on duty, I just came to pick up my check. But I can tell Finn and he'll bring it out.”

“Rey!” A voice interrupts -- Hux, her TA. Before she can even say hi, Hux is raising his glass toward Dr. Solo. “Ben, Rey is in the intro class, in my 10 o’clock section.”

“I know,” he says, with a sidelong glance at Rey. Her chest fills like a helium balloon. He looks at her like he’s sharing a private joke and she’s its sole recipient.

“Are these all film TAs?” Rey asks, a little disconcerted at how much that look has unbalanced her.

Hux rolls his eyes. “You’re new at the university, aren’t you,” he said, and Rey  _ bristles. _

“Don’t be a fucking asshole, Hux,” says the woman next to him. She’s in her late twenties, very pale, her platinum-blonde hair styled in a severe bob, and she has a sneer to rival Hux’s. “I’m Phasma,” she tells Rey. “We’re all in Ben’s grad seminar, Film and Philosophy. And we’re from all over campus. Film and media studies cross over with a lot of programs.” She smirks at Solo and adds in a tone suspiciously close to condescension, “I guess this is his idea of a treat for us. He’s too good for a hipster oasis like the Verge, apparently.”

Rey takes in Phasma’s lazy confidence, Solo’s apparent lack of response. Her annoyance at Hux hasn’t yet faded and she feels supremely stupid and out of place, standing outside this group,  _ the waitress  _ at a dump that Phasma clearly feels is beneath her _ .  _ Time to make a break for it. 

“Nice to meet you. Sorry, I’d better get my check. I just saw Maz behind the bar.” She begins to back up and extricate herself from the conversation. “I'll let Finn know you want a pitcher, Professor.”

Solo’s face doesn’t change, but he turns in his seat to face her even as she draws away. “Bring an extra glass. For yourself,” he clarifies. 

Her mind stutters to a stop. “Uh….”

“Oh - do you want something else?” he asks, misunderstanding the reason for her hesitation. “Whatever you want, put it on my tab.”

She was… definitely not going to do that.

But he’s glanced away from her, inclining his ear toward Phasma who is speaking softly enough that Rey can’t hear her, and Rey takes the opportunity to retreat.

Finn’s at the bar as she comes round. “Hey, party room wants a pitcher of wheat,” she says.

“So pull it for ‘em,” Finn says, in the process of tapping a new keg of Guinness.

“Pull this,” Rey says, making a rude gesture at him, beaming as he cracks up. Finn started as a waiter at the Hairy Dog around the same time she did over the summer, and though they’d had a rocky start, eventually something clicked. She’s not in the habit of letting people into her life, and Finn’s not quite a confidant, not yet, but… he’s one of the good ones.

“I’ll take care of it. Maz left your check under the bar while you were chatting up dude over there.” He nods significantly in the direction of the party room.

“I wasn’t  _ chatting up  _ anybody!”

“Sure, peanut,” he says over his shoulder as he pulls the first draft from the new keg.

“Don’t  _ \--  _ oh, just give me the damn check,” she says, but the effect is somewhat lessened by her inability to keep a straight face for a second.

“Man, this line is acting up again,” Finn complains, turning around and setting a glass of Guinness foam on the work surface in front of her.

“I guess I could take a look at it.”

“Don’t bother, I know you’re busy. Chatting up dudes.”

Rey rolls with it. “It’s hard work.”

“Especially when you’re so out of practice,” Finn says, ducking fast to root around for the envelope under the bar.

When he pops back up, his smile turns into an  _ oh shit _ look that tells her all she needs to know. Rey whips her head around anyway and sees Solo behind her, phone in one hand, wallet in the other. 

“Finn was just going to bring you your pitcher,” Rey says hastily.  _ Fuck, how much had he heard?  _ The thought blinks through her head lightning-fast, followed just as quickly by  _ Fuck, he’s big. _

“I’m paying up,” he says, waving his wallet at her.

He doesn’t  _ seem _ like he’d overheard anything, but Rey’s nowhere close to breathing easy yet. Somehow she hadn’t realized how big he actually was. Every time she’s seen him, he’s been across the room or sitting down.

But his largeness is an inescapable fact now. This is a man, she thinks wildly, whose height alone would make you think about cleaning the top of your fridge before inviting him over.

Finn’s drawing the pitcher in one second and on the register in the next, and Rey’s about to excuse herself when Solo says, “Make sure to put her drink on my tab.”

Both Finn and Rey jerk to look at him.

“Uh… what did you end up ordering?” Solo says, eyeing the glass of foam in front of her.

Finn makes a choked noise and turns to shut off the tap.

“Oh, I didn’t -- that is --” Rey flounders helplessly. She’s fairly certain she’s never endured such an awkward exchange  _ in her life. _ Solo doesn’t seem to get it; his face is expressionless, devoid of any clues to what he’s thinking.

“Aaand here’s your check,” Finn says, brandishing it at him with a flourish. Solo hands off his card but doesn’t take his eyes off Rey.

“Thanks, but I didn’t order anything. I appreciate the offer, but I was heading out.”

Solo sticks his hands in the pockets of his stonewashed black jeans. Around his left wrist is a watch so big that it actually looks proportional to his massive hand. “Can I give you a ride?”

This time Finn’s reaction is silent, but she can see it in the way his shoulders jerk up.

“I’m good, I can walk.”

He frowns. “It’s pretty late. My car’s parked right outside.”

“I mean,” Rey says, “I’m heading to my other job. It’s literally four blocks away.”

“Where do you work?”

Rey can  _ feel _ Finn trying to make eye contact. She holds Solo’s gaze steadily. “Plutt’s.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “The auto body shop? They’re open this late?”

“Oh, Plutt’s an  _ ass _ ,” Finn interjects, handing Solo his card and receipt back. “Has her working all hours. Guy’s a slave driver.”

“Oy, this slave gets paid,” Rey says.

“Wage slave still a slave, peanut.”

Rey would literally slough off all her skin right there if it would get her out of here. “On that  _ delightful  _ note, I’m gonna run,” she said, tossing a mock salute in Finn’s direction and backing out. “Professor, good to see you, looking forward to your lectures next week, have a good one, bye!”

She’s out the door before either of them can respond.

*

Rey Johnson 9:45 pm

_ I’m gonna murder you in. your. sleep. _

Finn 9:46 pm

_ Ur gonna thank me later _

Rey Johnson 9:46 pm

_ hard to thank a dead man _

Finn 9:48 pm

_ some people say im an amazing wing man clearly my talent is wasted on u _

Rey Johnson 9:49 pm

_ lololol you need a HOBBY. Nite x _

Finn 9:49 pm

_ nite boo_

*

“I can’t believe you convinced me to come watch this with you,” Rose hisses at her as the credits start to roll.

“Like you were going to do anything else on a Monday night,” Rey whispers back. They’re scooting out of the row like they can’t get out fast enough. It’s a little after ten and all Rey wants to do is curl up somewhere and sleep, but she’s nowhere near done with her day yet. The film screening ran much later than she’d expected -- despite Dr. Ackbar’s reminder last week that it was a little longer than their other films, she hadn’t planned on almost three hours of sweeping Japanese epic. “Besides,  _ you’re _ the film student, I thought you’d be into it.”

“We both thought wrong,” Rose says, waving at the student worker who had been on film screening duty. “That film was not on the syllabus when I took the class. Not sure how I feel about this innovation of Solo’s.”

“Maybe you should come to his lecture tomorrow and let him know.”

“Hard pass,” Rose says as they exit the lecture hall.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but It wasn’t that bad,” Rey says, shouldering her backpack.

“I mean, I’ve seen Fellini’s  _ 8 ½  _ so I know for a fact that there are worse films out there,” Rose laughs. “Pro tip: sneak some booze into that one. Hey, I’m starving. Wanna go downtown, get a pizza?”

“Can’t,” Rey says, redoing her ponytail as they walk down the hall. “I got a text from Maz, says Finn went home with food poisoning, so I’m heading over to finish up his shift. I can walk with you, though.”

“You’re gonna be dead tomorrow,” Rose says.

Rey has to agree with her. The bar won’t close until two and she has an eight a.m. “I’ll make it work somehow,” she says with a grimace. “I need all the hours I can get right now, and I’d rather be working for Maz than Plutt.”

They walk out of the Fine Arts Building into the unseasonably warm September night, Rose chattering away about what they’d been studying in Poe Dameron’s course on blockbuster film. It’s bizarre to Rey, who has always thought of academia as an institution so elite as to be completely inaccessible, that someone could get college credit for writing about water baptism symbolism in  _ Pirates of the Caribbean.  _ It’s almost as bizarre as being here herself. Never in her life had she allowed herself to dream that she’d get to go to university; if it hadn’t been for the career development counselor at Job Corps, she’d be facing scut work at a garage like Plutt’s for life.

But her aptitude with machinery and maths had impressed her instructors, who pushed her to join the College Program. Her counselor agreed, and though he told her that a mechanical engineering program would be much more academically rigorous than anything they offered at Job Corps, he told her she had the aptitude for it. And once Rey found out about the grants she qualified for… well, the decision had pretty much made itself.

She’s too busy and too exhausted to take a moment to feel proud of herself, though. It’s one of the hardest things she’s ever done, trying to claw her way into a higher social class through sheer force of will. As shitty as Unkar Plutt is, she’s used to doing oil changes and replacing fan belts. She did it for two years in Job Corps and for three years before that at her foster dad’s garage. In the college classroom, back in a school desk, surrounded by undergrads who all seem to own the same fucking MacBook, she feels profoundly unready.

Yet in her experience, life is more or less a series of worst-case scenarios that she’s always managed to survive. She’s learned that she can’t trust or lean on anyone else, sure. But she’s never let herself down. And she’s not about to start now. 

*

The following day she heads to Skywalker Hall for her film lecture. She makes her way to the middle of the auditorium as usual, sitting up a little straighter when Solo walked in. He’s dressed more formally than she’s yet seen him, but still quite plain in black slacks, a charcoal dress shirt, and black shoes polished to a high shine. He hands the stacks of lecture guides to Phasma and Hux, who start handing them out down the rows of seats, and he plugs his own laptop into the display terminal.

For the past few weeks, Dr. Ackbar has been lecturing from frankly byzantine PowerPoint presentations, never taking less than five minutes to figure out how to mirror the display from the room computer to the projector. Ben Solo, however, starts by snapping the projector screen out of the way and looking for a piece of chalk that isn’t broken. He leaps into his lecture without so much as an introduction, apparently relying on nothing but the same lecture guide he’d drawn up for the class and his memory.

This week’s topic is filmic adaptation. Rey, though she doesn’t feel at home in the academic setting, has always been a voracious reader, and  _ King Lear --  _ the source text for this particular adaptation -- had been a favorite of hers during a time in her life that she wondered  _ every day _ what had happened to her parents. Why they had left. Whether they would ever realize how much she loved them and finally come back, even if only to say goodbye.

“A successful adaptation isn’t about how well the filmmaker apes the source text. There’s never going to be a one to one correlation between a Shakespeare play and a 1985 Japanese historical drama. Adaptation requires  _ interpretation  _ whereby the filmmaker mediates the original work through his own thesis, his own artistic vision and opinions _ .  _ Every costume, every prop, every angle of every shot, every lick of paint on the matte -- these are all deliberate choices, if the filmmaker’s worth watching at all, and each choice can tell you something, if you’re paying attention.”

Solo is pulling down the projector screen and dimming the lights as he talks. 

Akira Kurosawa’s  _ Ran  _ had been challenging. Maybe it was the cultural and historical barrier. Maybe it was the fact that something about it had struck her on a more emotional level than cognitive one. While Rose had been giving her shit afterward about girls night turning out to involve a three-hour-long Japanese Shakespeare adaptation, Rey had been fighting off a panic attack that came out of nowhere.

A clip starts playing, muted as Solo continues. The death-like figure of Lord Hidetora descends from the burning husk of the Third Castle. Below him are the yellow and red armies of his sons who have come to kill him. Driven to the brink of insanity, he staggers down the steps, retaining little of his former dignity. But as he approaches the two armies, the sea of red and yellow part for him -- slowly, haltingly -- and let him pass.

“The composition of this shot, what is it saying?”

There’s silence. Someone coughs. Solo’s face is washed out by the milky light of the projector as he gazes around the darkness.

Rey’s heart is pounding. When she’d first watched this scene, she had felt sick with the inevitability of his tragedy, with the horror of a person becoming the engine of their own destruction. But she keeps her thoughts to herself until Solo cold-calls her.

“Rey?”

She nearly jumps out of her skin when she realizes he’s staring right at her, peering through the dim auditorium like she’s sitting there alone instead of surrounded by a hundred other students. Still, she glances around and then back at him before she’s sure he’s addressing her.

In this light, his eyes look black. “What kind of shot are we looking at here?” He reaches over to his laptop and taps it, freezing the image on the screen.

Rey clears her throat. “It’s… a long shot,” she says, the vocabulary still a little unfamiliar after just a few weeks. “An extreme long shot. You can see the whole castle, and the armies in the front, and the fields behind.”

“Yep, long shot, deep focus. Why is Kurosawa showing us this scene from this perspective?”

She bites her lip for a moment.

“It’s… quiet,” she says.

He doesn’t respond, just looks at her over the heads of all the students between them. She tries to put words to her raw feelings.

“Leading up to this scene is chaos,” she tries. He glances back at the screen behind him, manages to find her eyes again almost immediately. “Soldiers on horses, archers shooting flaming arrows, people getting shot, screaming. The inside of the castle on fire and falling down around the king. And now it’s almost like… his turmoil is over. He’s not fighting it anymore. He’s giving up. Like in the play, at this point he wanders off into the wilderness.” Understanding flashes through her. “It’s like all that chaos is inside him now.”

Solo seems galvanized by this. He snaps up her line of thought immediately and pivots to face the screen. “Good, yes. It’s a moment of monumental change, both in his internal state and his external circumstances, that only this extremely formal, stylized shot can capture. You see the king descend, come down from his castle, like he’s abdicating his throne.” He reproduces the trajectory with sweeping gestures of his broad hands. “With the perspective of the long shot and the drama of the long take you get that sense of grandeur, that as low as he has been brought, there’s still power in his legacy. And the positioning of his sons’ armies --” here he gestures at one corner of the screen and the other -- “here and here, they take up barely a sliver of the screen, so you can see how  _ utterly  _ insignificant they are compared to the patriarch. This man they came here not only to dethrone but to kill -- they let him pass. No one will ever live up to this man, no matter how hard they fight. Part of the tragedy is that they will never escape him -- they’ll be standing in his shadow for eternity.”

The lights come on not long after that. Solo tells them to get their first drafts back from their TAs on their way out, and then he practically runs up the stairs, taking them two at a time like the room was on fire.

Somehow, Rey gets to the door, feeling a little dazed. She’s out of it just enough that she jumps when Hux addresses her from his post at the door.

“You’d be wise to include some of that insight in your next paper,” he says scathingly as he hands back the paper she’d turned in a week and a half before. 

The emotional miasma left in her chest by the film and the discussion solidifies into dread. She sees the verdict in a slash of red ink, the smirk on Hux’s pasty face, and she feels for a moment like she’s going to throw up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scene in question is [here.](https://vimeo.com/205595777) The clip they discuss in class starts around marker 10:35.
> 
> Hi friends! This is the first Reylo fic I've written (though I've read tons in the last couple of years). I've got a pretty solid outline for where we're going in the next 7+ chapters. There will be angst. There will be smut. There will be, in radical defiance of every cynical narrative, a HEA. Please let me know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to MrsMancuspia, VioletHoure666 and SleepyOwlet for their invaluable feedback! :)

The cafe attached to the Fine Arts Building is never a good place to try to get work done. It’s filled with students at all hours of the day, not to mention other faculty in the complex, who love not having to go outside to get their caffeine fix. But it’s eight in the morning, and Ben was sure he could get half an hour to himself to drink a coffee and leaf through the latest issue of _ Film Comment _.

But he’s _ just _ gotten comfortable at the table next to the window overlooking Naberrie Quad when Poe Dameron breezes in out of nowhere and drops into the chair across from him. He’s wearing an orange puffer vest over a turtleneck and carrying a shaker bottle of something green and distinctly lumpy and Ben clenches his jaw, resisting every snide, cutting comment that immediately comes to mind.

“Morning, Kylo,” Poe says. “Getting out ahead of your day? Getting a little reading in?”

Ben glares up at him and decides self control is overrated. “Fuck off.”

“Your mother is _ so _ much nicer than you,” Poe says mildly.

“That’s what she wants you to think.”

Poe laughs outright. “You’d catch more flies with honey than with that sourpuss expression, bud.”

Ben sighs, wipes a hand down his face. “Is there a point to this barrage of patronizing positivity or are you going to let me drink my coffee in peace?”

“Come on, Ben.” Poe rolls his eyes. He starts to shake his breakfast drink vigorously. “It’s small talk. A social ritual sacred to populations in the midwestern United States. It literally will not kill you.”

“Can you say the same for that?” Ben asks, nodding his head to indicate Poe’s drink.

“Hey.” Poe pops the lid on the bottle and takes a long swig, maintaining eye contact the whole time. Then he re-caps it, wipes his mouth, points a finger at Ben, and says, “Respect the power shake.” 

Ben snorts.

Poe, apparently satisfied with the conclusion of opening negotiations of a conversation with Ben Solo, launches into a story about the latest batshit crazy gossip from the department office. Apparently Ackbar wrote to an adjunct, who was being paid five grand to teach an online course of a hundred students, and told her they were canceling the class for the foreseeable future because another instructor, one on a year-long non-renewable contract, was planning to teach a brick and mortar version of the same course.

“But get this. The trad class only seats twenty students. That’s not enough revenue to cover Narviz’s salary for the year, let alone benefits. I mean, I’m not one for extorting cheap labor, but it’s a no-brainer, right? Better to serve a hundred students for five grand than twenty students for ten grand, or whatever it is Narviz’s making for that course.”

“Sure,” Ben says.

“Oh and it gets even better,” Poe says, clearly lost in the drama of his own story. “Kaydel told me Ackbar had her draft and send an updated contract to Narviz, _ extending _ his contract _ and increasing his salary. _ Without approval from the CFO. ‘We have to support our faculty.’ My ass. You _ know _ this is a pissing contest with the dean’s office. It’s like his sad little one-man stand against the new resource allocation model.”

“Crazy,” Ben says.

“Yeah, he’s driving Kaydel nuts. She’s like… this close to rage-quitting and to be honest I don’t blame her. It’s like a demented game of chicken: he’s gonna retire any day now, right? But I’ve been asking myself that for _ four years. _”

“I wouldn’t bet on him retiring any time soon,” Ben says. “Ackbar’s been on this campus since Luke was a student here.”

Poe groaned and rubbed his jaw. “Jesus, what a joke.” But then he perks up. “That reminds me. How’s the screenplay coming?”

Ben sets his cup down on the table. “No.”

“I mean, I’m assuming you’re working on one,” Poe says.

“We’re not talking about this,” Ben replies firmly.

“Come on, Ben, you gotta get back up on the horse at some point.”

“Not if you've shot the horse and sold it to a glue factory.” Ben drains his coffee and stands up, issue of _ Film Comment _ in one hand, strap of his gym bag in the other. “I have office hours.”

Poe stands up too. “Good talk, bud,” he says, reaching out to bump his fist against Ben’s shoulder.

“Sure, _ bro, _” Ben says, already on his way to the door.

“Solo,” he hears Poe call to him across the café. “Call mom.”

Ben manages to exit without so much as flipping him off. At least he’s getting _ something _ out of therapy.

*

Ben heads up to the pigeon hole Kaydel had the gall to call an office when she issued him his keys a little over a year ago. The Fine Arts Building had been built in the fifties, and like several other notorious buildings on campus, it has undergone extensive renovations and additions over the decades, to the point that it now resembles an architectural Frankenstein’s monster. Ben has heard the rumors since childhood, of course, that there is at least one door that leads nowhere. 

_ Yeah… it’s the door to my office, _ he thinks, unlocking and kicking open the door with unnecessary force. It narrowly clears the corner of his desk and bounces off the straight-backed guest chair. Ben squeezes past the chair and around the desk, ducking to avoid clocking himself again on the industrial strip shelves mounted on the cinder block wall behind his workspace. By the time he settles in at his desk, the fluorescent lights have stopped flickering. One of them is dead, glowing a weird dull orange. He’s been trying to get campus facilities to fix it since last spring.

He can almost hear his mother’s voice: _ At least you have an office. _ At least he’s not an adjunct, sharing a cube and three desks and two Macs with four other adjuncts in the basement of the FAB with all the other academics God forgot. And that’s another thing he guesses he should be probably grateful for, that despite his career choices so far, he’s been able to cash in on his mother’s connections to get this job.

But he doesn’t feel grateful. He feels… well, he’s not sure if there’s anything there under the anger, despite what his therapist says about anger being the tip of the emotional iceberg.

And would it really be too much to ask for a window? He tries not to think of his old office, with its midtown view and vaulted ceilings and private elevator that never smelled like vinegar.

Luckily, there’s no rule that says he _ has _ to use the office except for the requisite two office hours a week, which is one thing Ackbar is weirdly strict about for everybody involved with the Intro class. Aside from himself, of course. Ackbar hasn’t held office hours since the late eighties.

Of course, his students -- in the tried and true tradition of students everywhere -- have avoided his deliberately early office hours, so they’ve given him an opportunity to alternate between prepping for class and staring at the story outline in GDocs, which he hasn’t updated in over eighteen months now.

Seriously, _ fuck _Poe.

He’s almost finished his notes for the afternoon’s Film & Phil seminar when there’s a knock on the door jamb. He looks up to see Rose Tico standing in the door.

“Hi Professor. How’s it going?”

“Tico,” he says. "What's up?"

“Not much! I was just showing my friend where your office was." She gestures to someone out of sight to her left. "She had some questions about Intro and I told her not to even bother knocking on Dr. Ackbar’s door. Ha!”

Ben doesn’t comment. Poe might not have a problem running his mouth about other faculty in the middle of a public space, but, Ben likes to think he has a little more couth than that. Rose backs out of the doorway with a wave and a cheery goodbye.

When Rey steps into view, he almost drops his pen.

“Sorry, is this… is this a bad time?”

The first thing he realizes is that she looks distraught. Of course, his instinctive response is the panicked thought that he’s done something wrong. That’s usually why women look at him like that.

Not that there’s been any women looking at him recently. In any way. At all. 

“No,” he says, almost harshly, and then clears his throat. _ Get a grip, Solo. _ “No, come in, it’s office hours.”

Rey stands there, biting her lip for a moment, before sidling into the closet-sized office and taking a seat, slinging a raggedy bookbag onto the floor at her feet. She’s wearing a t-shirt advertising The Lodge, one of the many student housing developments that have sprung up in recent years. There’s so many downtown and south of campus now that most of them stand half-empty, desperately advertising _ free _ first months and waiving deposits in an effort to entice students to sign a lease with them.

"I don't want to bother you, I know you're busy. Rose insisted I come, said you could help me."

Ben fiddles with his pen, twisting the clear acrylic cap on and off, feeling the threads lock and unlock. "What's up?"

"Well… it's my paper. We got our drafts back yesterday and… I'm kind of… panicking because I didn’t do so well and I really need to succeed in this class."

Her voice is soft and musical, the crispness of her English accent giving it an almost delicate quality. It was the first thing he noticed about her, when he started going to that hole in the wall over the summer.

"This is a writing intensive course,” he tells her. “Revisions are built into the format. It’s the grade on your revision that really matters, not the first draft. Make the edits Hux gave you and you’ll be fine.”

“I can’t get by on _ fine _.”

_ Fucking grade inflation _. “Did you bring your paper with you?”

She yanks her backpack up onto her lap and starts digging through it.

“Look, this class is…” _ Bullshit. _“...Really basic,” he tells her as he watches her rummage through her stuff. “You show up for lectures, do the reading, put a minimum degree of effort into your papers, and you’ll pass.”

She looks up at him, cheeks pink and eyes shiny. “You don’t understand. If I can’t keep my GPA above 3.2, I lose my scholarships. If I lose my scholarships, there is _ no way _ I can stay in school. Everything I make already goes to books and student fees and living expenses.” She passes her essay across the desk. “And I _ failed _ this paper. Even if I revise, I can only bring it up one letter grade.”

“An F?” Ben stares at the paper in his hand. “How’d you get an F?” She lets out a desperate noise that sounds like a tea kettle getting ready to start shrieking. “No, no, don’t -- hang on. Give me a minute, okay? Let me read through this.”

She nods hastily as he starts scanning through her paper.

These assignments can hardly be called papers, he thinks; they’re supposed to clock in at no more than three pages and are barely a step above a five-paragraph essay. _ But good grief, what was Hux doing? _ Has he completely discarded everything Ben discussed with the TAs in the grade norming session at the beginning of the semester? Not a single sentence in Rey’s essay is untouched by his red felt-tip. And Ben has never been the poster child for restraint, but even he can see this is excessive. Rey -- well, he doesn’t really know her. But he’d seen into her mind, however briefly, in the lecture yesterday. Her analysis of the scene from _ Ran _was insightful, if unpolished. He can’t imagine how she could write anything as bad as Hux seemed to think.

For the next few minutes, the silence in the office is deafening. Every rustle she makes as she fidgets is distracting. He’s glad for the desk between them because his instinct to lay a calming hand on her shoulder or her knee is… also distracting.

And as he finishes reading the essay, several emotions light through him simultaneously.

Fury with Hux for terrorizing a student with petty subjective quibbles. Triumph that he was _ right _ in guessing Rey’s insight in lecture wasn’t a fluke. And… excitement.

She has powerful potential.

He looks up at her. She’s staring at him, lips compressed in a thin line, worry etched in her brow.

“You…” he begins, and then stops. He clears his throat. “Okay. Look. First of all, this paper is a solid first draft. Your analysis and textual evidence is really tight. The problem is entirely formal.”

“What does that mean?”

He leans back, runs a hand back through his hair. “This course is writing intensive, and because of the size and the way it’s run, you have to think of these papers as a very specific genre of essay, one that makes it easy for the TA to tick off all the boxes on the grading rubric. Your TA has fifty students in his discussion sections. Each of you will write five papers this semester, _ plus _ revisions. And that’s on top of his own academic work. He doesn’t have time to give each paper the level of attention it deserves.” He hands her paper back to her. “Hux in particular, though, is…” _ A fucking asshole. _“Overzealous. I’ll talk with him, have him grade your revision from a fresh slate.”

She clutches the paper in both hands. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

He combs his fingers through his hair again and waves away her thanks.

“But…” she says. “I… still don’t know what I need to do to fix this. How do I make it fit the genre?”

He smirks. “You’ll be glad to hear that’s the easy part,” he says, and he watches some of the worry drain out of her face. “I cracked the code back when I was in this class.”

“You went to school here?”

The question shocks a laugh out of him. “I did. For a whole year and a half before I dropped out. Which, uh, should not be the take-away here.”

“That’s _ not _ going to happen,” she says earnestly, but he’s pleased to hear a touch of humor in her voice.

“So the secret code. Your TA should be looking for three things, basically. First,” he says, ticking points off on his fingers one by one, “does your thesis completely answer the prompt? Second: do you support your argument with textual evidence and properly cite your sources? And third: does your structure build a coherent argument? I.e., you should be able to take out all the shit except the thesis and your topic sentences and have the skeleton of your argument.”

“That sounds… pretty formulaic.”

“It’s egregiously formulaic, and that’s both the curse and the blessing of these assignments. Innovation is punished, but if you follow the formula you’ll ace the course.”

“I’m not complaining. Formulas I can handle.” She’s frowning. “What about AP style? I’ve never had to write a paper using it before. I found a guide online but, erm, clearly I messed something up.”

“I’ll send you a link for an app that’ll take the hard work out of it,” he says, already opening a new message in Outlook.

They talk for another twenty minutes or so about writing mechanics and structure. That’s what she’s most interested in, understandably, but he keeps having to restrain his urge to steer the conversation back to her analysis. He wants to pick her brain about the film they watched this week. Find out what else makes her tick.

Too soon she’s shoving her paper -- now covered in her own penciled notes -- back in her bag and thanking him, rushing off to her next class. He leans back in his chair, pressing the cap of his pen against his mouth. At least… at least she left in a better state than she arrived. He thinks he’ll savor this feeling for a while, whatever it is.

*

**From: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 12:32 pm  
**To: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **resources

_ Rey, _

_ re: our discussion during office hours, a couple of links:  
__Zotero, for collecting sources and generating citations _ _ (your works cited page will thank you)  
__The only AP style guide you’ll ever need_

_ Thanks for stopping by today. I hope it helped. _

_ *** _

_ Ben Solo  
_ _Assistant Professor of Practice  
_ _Dept. of Film & Media Studies  
_ _Fine Arts Building C1034-B  
_ _Takodana State University  
_ _Tel: don’t even think about it_

**From: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 12:45 pm  
**To: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Re: resources

_ Dr. Solo, _

_ Thank you! It was super helpful you have no idea. Rose was right about you! _

_ Cheers _

_ Rey _

**From: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 1:16 pm  
**To: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Re: re: resources

_ No problem. It’s important that our TAs are all on the same page about expectations for these papers so I appreciate the feedback. _

_ Not sure I want to know what Tico’s been saying about me…. _

_ *** _

_Ben Solo  
_ _Assistant Professor of Practice  
_ _Dept. of Film & Media Studies  
_ _Fine Arts Building C1034-B  
_ _Takodana State University  
_ _Tel: don’t even think about it_

**From: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 1:19 pm  
**To: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Re: re: re: resources

_ Lol only good things I swear! _

_ About Dr. Ackbar, on the other hand…….. _👀

**From: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 1:23 pm  
**To: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Re: re: re: re: resources

_ Emojipedia tells me that emoji is referred to as “pervy eyes.” _

_ There are some things a man is better off not knowing. _

_ *** _

_Ben Solo  
_ _Assistant Professor of Practice  
_ _Dept. of Film & Media Studies  
_ _Fine Arts Building C1034-B  
_ _Takodana State University  
_ _Tel: don’t even think about it_

**From: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 1:30 pm  
**To: **Rose Tico <rt0948@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Fw: Re: re: re: re: resources

_ Omfg bdasddgbdijdkj ROSE IM SORRY _ 😆😆

_ Sent from my Android phone _

**From: **Ben Solo <solob@tsu.edu>  
**Sent: **Wednesday, September 11, 20--, 7:39 pm  
**To: **Armitage Hux <ah1012@tsu.edu>; Phasma Gwynn <pg4987@tsu.edu>  
**CC: **Gial Ackbar <ackbarg@tsu.edu>  
**BCC: **Rey Johnson <rj8846@tsu.edu>  
**Subject: **Revision grade

_Phasma, Hux, _

_ It has come to my attention that the grades on the Intro students' first drafts are extremely uneven. Until we address this issue, please disregard the syllabus’ limit on the revised grade and grade revisions as you would an initial draft; i.e. if a student turns in an A paper, give them the A. If either of you have any questions regarding this decision, please email me._

_Additionally, I would like to set up a time for another grade norming session so we can get this straight. In the meantime, remember that this is an intro class, not a graduate seminar. Refrain from terrorizing the students (too much)._

_ *** _

_Ben Solo  
_ _Assistant Professor of Practice  
_ _Dept. of Film & Media Studies  
_ _Fine Arts Building C1034-B_  
_Takodana State University  
_ _Tel: don’t even think about it_

*

Somehow Rey makes it through Solo’s Thursday lecture without incident, and almost without drawing his attention, with the exception of a nod of hello when he first comes in. The sight of the back of Hux’s head down at the front of the room sends a frisson of righteous indignation through her, but the soul-sucking horror she felt when she got her first draft back has faded to a tension that motivates rather than debilitates. 

She doesn’t have time to act on that motivation, though, for several days. It’s been all hands on deck at the auto body shop until they finish processing the goods from a massive haul that Plutt brought in. Rey doesn’t have the luxury of turning down shifts at Plutt’s. As odious as Unkar Plutt is, as vile his business practices are, as poorly he compensates his crew… it’s still steady, if grueling, work.

“Teedo, if you don’t learn to keep your grubby paws off of my kit, I will _ slam them in the door. _”

It’s also been good practice for developing her people skills.

Teedo squawks something unintelligible through the respirator as she grabs her locking pliers, which he had stolen _ again _to use as a makeshift clamp. Rey ignores him, stomping out of the paint room and back into bay three, which has long ago ceased to function as a repair bay. Two of the three walls are completely hidden behind mountains of car parts that are too damaged to move but Plutt is too cheap to scrap. Like layers of sedimentary rock, you can date the stages of Plutt’s operation according to the age of the constituent parts. Or you could if everything weren’t completely coated in decades’ worth of grease, dust, and exhaust residue.

Plutt is waiting for her when she returns to her workbench. He’s a massive man, face puffy and perpetually flushed, especially when he’s angry, which is pretty much always. This moment is no exception.

“Keep out of the paint room, girl, don’t make me tell you again,” he bellows at her.

Stationed around the bay on their own workbenches, the rest of the team -- Riok Ragul, Vare Malago, Binz Scoty, Ivano Troade -- apply themselves more vigorously to their tasks. Nobody likes to draw Plutt’s attention if they can help it.

“I was just getting my pliers back from Teedo,” Rey explains. “The studs on these carburetors are completely frozen.”

“I don’t want your measly excuses. Figure it out or let someone else more competent take over.”

Rey knows better than to argue with him. Arguing with Plutt is like playing chicken with a trash compactor. She sits down and gets back to work.

It’s almost midnight by the time they call it quits. They’d spent the better part of Friday sorting, dismantling, cleaning, reassembling, packaging, and inventorying the fourth pallet of auto parts from Plutt’s score, and Rey’s hands are stinging and aching under all the grease.

“If I never see another carb stud it will be too soon,” she mutters to Riok as she waits her turn at the wash station.

“Careful what you wish for,” he says darkly. “You don’t know what’s in those other two pallets.”

Riok finishes up and Rey spends five minutes with the scrub brush, but her nails are still black when she’s done. There’s only so much she can do with cold water. She strips out of her greasy brown coveralls and shoves them in a plastic shopping bag, which she then stuffs into the drawstring backpack she snagged for free from a local bank’s kiosk on campus during welcome week.

She waves goodbye to Jaws, Plutt’s mangy guard dog, as she wheels her bike out of the junkyard and onto the street.

The north side of town is quiet at night. The business strip is empty, illuminated by a couple of fast-food joints and gas stations. The only noise is the dull roar of long-haul truckers on the interstate, just out of sight to the north. She stops by Casey’s for a couple cans of Coke, some M&Ms, and a slice of pizza that’s been sitting under the heat lamps for god knows how long, and then she heads to the 24-hour laundromat a few streets down.

The place is empty and the fluorescent overhead lights nearly blinding at first, but her eyes adjust fast. She’s glad to have the place to herself. She puts in a load of her street clothes in one machine, and in another she dumps her greasy coveralls and one of the sodas. Once the machines are running, she hops up onto one of the folding tables, cracks open the remaining soda can, and she settles in with her Chromebook to work on her essay revision.

Ordinarily, she finds the laundromat a very soothing place to be. Your only task is really to sit there and wait, and the rhythmic white noise of the machines never fails to calm her, to put her in an almost meditative state. She’s done some of her best thinking in laundromats.

But tonight, she feels her thoughts straying over and over to a hundred little old aches and anxieties. New ones, too. The bad thing about having something is that you can lose it. Before she came to Takodana U, she had nothing. Now, she feels like everything she’s fought to gain is just a bad week away from being ripped out of her hands, her plans for her future alongside it. She knows she wants more than _ this, _that there’s a life worth living waiting for her out there, but… it’s hard. It’s so hard, and after a day like today, she wonders if she’s any closer to getting there than she was five years ago.

_ It can’t be for nothing, _ she thinks as she watches the cursor on her screen blink at her. _ There must be more than this. _

The white noise of the machines, the hum of the overhead lights, the whir of her Chromebook on her lap, the fretful turn of her own thoughts around and around each other… it all adds up to a deafening kind of emptiness. She pulls her phone out of her back pocket.

_ Rey Johnson 1:14 am _

_ Hey are you still up _

_ Rey Johnson 1:21 am _

_ Guess not lol _

_ Vibin at the EZ Clean, who is crushing this Friday night _

She snaps a selfie, making sure to capture the detritus of her convenience store feast on the table around her, and sends it to Rose. She doesn’t even bother texting Finn, who she knows will be dead to the world.

Turning her attention back to her computer, she opens her student email in a new tab. The most recent message is the one from Solo to Hux and Phasma about the revision grades. If either of them responded, she wasn't copied. In any case, does 'reply all' even apply to BCC'd addresses...?

As she’s contemplating the likelihood of Hux figuring out that she was the one to complain about his grading -- which she tries to convince herself is an irrational anxiety -- she notices suddenly that the little status dot next to Solo’s name in the sender’s info field is green.

She stares for a long moment.

And nearly knocks her Chromebook to the floor when the buzzer on her machine sounds.

Grumbling, she gets up and switches her laundry over. She paces the ancient, scarred linoleum for a minute as she waits for her other machine to finish so she can dry everything together. At one point she returns to her computer, hovers her cursor over the “new email” button.

The other machine’s buzzer sounds and she goes to check it. It looks like the grease has come out of her coveralls just fine, so she tosses them in the dryer with the rest of her clothes and feeds it another few quarters.

When she returns to her computer, she closes her email tab and does her best to turn her attention back to her paper.

By the time her laundry is finished drying, it’s half past two and her paper is looking a little better despite her difficulty focusing. She folds the clean clothes, packs them carefully into her backpack, followed by her Chromebook, and, emptying her last couple of M&Ms into her mouth, she heads out the door and back to campus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think! Comment below!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No beta this chapter, but I got great feedback from MrsMancuspia and SleepyOwlet!

“I just don’t see what the big deal is,” Rose is saying. “I didn’t go to homecoming when I was in high school, or the first two years here. I have no interest in football or big, drunken crowds, so I don’t see why I’d start celebrating it now.”

It’s Sunday night and Rey is a couple of hours into a shift at the Hairy Dog that has not been very lucrative thus far. Rose stopped by for a drink that turned into three, because Rey and Finn have been comping her tab so she’ll keep them company. It’s only Rose’s third time at the bar, but she already has a spot that Rey thinks of as hers, right across from where Finn usually does his side work.

“All the more reason for you to experience it now, before it’s too late!” Finn is chopping lemons a little too enthusiastically and pauses to gesture at Rose with the knife. “You know, so when you’re old and decrepit you can have some fond memories to look back on.”

Rose makes a face at him. “You are  _ such  _ a jock,” she says. “I’ll have plenty of fond memories, ones that don’t involve blacking out at a homecoming party.”

Finn looks scandalized. “Not a party!  _ A rager. _ ”

Rose glances at Rey, who gives her a  _ sure, Jan _ kind of look.

“That’s comforting,” Rose says to Finn. “Did you even  _ go _ to school here?”

_ No, _ Rey mouths, shaking her head at her behind an oblivious Finn, where she’s pulling pints of kolsch.

“Look, thank me later when you beat me at beer pong and learn to do the perfect keg stand,” Finn says as he dumps lemon wedges into a little acrylic bucket.

“He is not lying about that second one,” Rey says. “He will attempt to teach you. And he will fail.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Finn calls as she decamps with a tray of drinks to the party room.

When she returns with her empty tray, Finn and Rose are whispering to each other at the end of the bar and grinning in her direction.

“I don’t even want to know what this is about,” she says as she comes within earshot, flicking a finger at the two of them.

Finn lounges against the bar. She does  _ not _ like the look of mischief on his face. “Don’t look now,” he says, “but Professor Pervy Eyes just walked in.”

“Oh, you mean Dr. Don’t Even Think About It?” Rose replies conversationally as Rey whips around.

“ _ Shut up shut up _ ,” Rey hisses, because indeed, there’s Solo, shaking out an umbrella, standing in the doorway and talking with a shorter man who is covered head to mid-thigh by a violently orange rain poncho. “I regret ever having introduced you two,” Rey mutters. “You should know.”

“Better see what he waaaants,” Finn sing-songs as he whisks around the corner of the bar and heads for one of the two-tops by the door.

“That’s my cue to go, too,” Rose says and slides off the stool. “Thanks for the free drinks.”

Rey turns away from the door, and behind her she hears Rose’s chipper voice, sounding like she’s completely surprised: “Oh, hi, Professors!”

She pinches the bridge of her nose.

It’s been a little over a week since she went to Solo’s office hours, and since then he’s been back to the bar three times. But instead of making a beeline for his preferred table in the corner, as his summer habits dictated, he’s been sitting at the bar, working his way through stacks of grading or taking notes in a large folio with one textbook or another laid out on the bar.

And every night, as he’s paying his tab, he asks if he can give Rey a lift home.

She turns him down, of course. Because it’s  _ weird _ . He was her customer, but now he’s also her professor, and if she created a Venn diagram of the obligations associated with those roles, there would be very little overlap between circles and “driving me home from work” wouldn’t fit in either.

He doesn’t seem to mind when she turns him down; doesn’t react at all, in fact, when she tells him she’s not done with her shift or that she’s not going straight home. But he hasn’t let it stop him from asking each time anyway.

And there are a bunch of reasons why it bothers her. Good reasons, like Boundaries Are Important. Don’t Ride With Randos. Maybe He’s An Axe Murderer. This Would Be Creepy On Someone Else.

However, what  _ really _ bothers her is that it’s... so not creepy. Rey has had her fair share of creepers; she has a well-honed sense for people who shouldn’t be trusted in a dark alley. She wouldn’t have survived this long without it.

But the alarm bells Ben Solo sets off in her head are a completely different kind. 

“I’m telling you, the look on her face alone – when she said you took the cohort here for drinks –”

Rey turns around and finds Solo and his friend directly in front of her. Solo’s leaning on the bar, a pained expression on his face as his friend talks at him, his head swiveling around like it’s on a ball bearing as he takes in the red brick walls plastered with classic monster movie posters and tin bar signs, all illuminated by the colorful Christmas lights strung around the perimeter of the room.

“–  _ that _ look of utter loathing? On Phasma’s face? Is kind of a five star guarantee I’m gonna  _ love  _ it,” the other guy finishes, then starts to struggle out of the poncho.

Rey decides to pretend she didn’t hear the comment. “Hi, Professor,” Rey says to Solo, sliding a beer mat in front of him and he catches it with one broad finger. He nods at her in greeting, his long face quiet and serious, and she exhales softly.

“Rey, this is Poe,” Solo says, indicating his friend. “He’s one of the other faculty in media studies.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rey says. It takes her a second to put two and two together, that this is Poe Dameron, who teaches the blockbuster film course that Rose is taking. Poe beams at her with this thousand-watt smile. He’s tan, athletic, and half a foot shorter than Solo, with dark curly hair that’s going a little grey at the temples, and when he gets out of the poncho, she sees he’s wearing a puffer vest over a turtleneck. Somehow, he still manages to look roguish and charming, if a little damp.

“This is my first time here,” Poe tells her. “Didn’t know this was the media studies hotspot in town. Rose, big guy here, apparently his whole Film and Phil seminar….”

“We’re a well-kept secret,” says Rey, gesturing at the mostly empty room. “So what can I get you?”

“Anything new on tap?” Solo says, squinting at the draft list above the bar.

“Since you were last in? We’ve got Mother’s new seasonal, a ginger wheat beer.”

“I’ll have that.” He hands her his card. “Keep it open.”

“Sure thing,” she says. “And for you?” she asks Poe over her shoulder while she starts Solo’s pour.

Poe looks over the draft list while Rey processes Solo’s card, and eventually he selects a brutally bitter locally-brewed IPA before excusing himself for the restroom. Rey struggles to keep her eyes off Solo. She doesn’t know when she started looking at him, but now that she has, it’s hard to stop. He’s wearing a loose navy v-neck tee that shows off a distracting amount of throat and clavicle as he leans over the bar. As she puts his pint in front of him, she’s struck briefly at how  _ pale _ he is, how starkly his freckles and moles stand out against his white skin.

When she manages to tear her gaze away for a second, she sees Finn on the other side of the room, wiping down a table in exaggerated slow motion and grinning at her.

_ Oh, fuck off, _ she mouths at him.

_ Who, me?  _ he mouths back, plastering a look of theatrical surprise on his face before he bursts out laughing and hightails it to the cellar.

Solo, apparently oblivious to her staring and her attempts to refrain from staring, accepts the glass without comment, raises it to her in a silent toast, and takes a long swallow. She looks at him expectantly, waiting for a verdict.

He licks the foam off his upper lip.

“I looked up Plutt’s on Yelp,” he says.

Whatever she was expecting him to say, it definitely wasn’t  _ that. _ “I beg your pardon?”

“The reviews for the place are terrible. His customers make him sound like a shady asshole.”

“Well.” Rey picks up the bar rag and tosses it from one hand to the other. “I won’t deny he’s a shady asshole. Among other things.”

He arches an eyebrow. “So... why are you working for him?”

Rey isn’t sure how to answer. She settles for turning to start Poe’s draft, and after a moment of puzzled hesitation, she says over her shoulder, “You ask like you’ve never had to settle for a job you didn’t like.”

In the mirror above the bar she sees him incline his glass toward her. “Fair point.”

“Plus, you know,” she says, turning back to the tap, “I’m good at fixing stuff. And it could be worse. I could be doing road repair. That’s a job from hell.” She’d know. One of her first jobs out of high school was as a flagger on a highway construction site. The statistics about motor vehicle accidents resulting in worker deaths were chilling.

He laughs and she literally shivers at the sound, warm and reverberating straight to her core. “So long as it’s temporary, I guess,” he says.

Temporary? She turns on her heel to stare at him, feeling indignation wash through her like indigestion. Never mind the fact that she too hopes that her gig with Plutt ends with her finding a job with someone who has the decency to keep a functioning hot water heater in the building. She just figures that building will be another auto body shop.

“I’m sorry, do you have something against auto mechanics, Dr. Solo?”

Before he can respond, Poe appears once again at his side. “Dr. Solo? Is that what he makes you call him?”

A flush spreads instantly across Solo’s cheeks, so vivid that Rey wonders if his ears, too, might light up the same way under all that hair. “It’s Ben,” he tells Rey, looking pained and doing his best not to react to Poe’s grin. “Just Ben. Dr. Solo is my mother.”

Rey glances from him to Poe and back again. “Oh. I thought you were a professor.”

“Oh, he is!” Poe says as Solo – Ben – practically buries his nose in his beer. “He’s an assistant professor of practice. Academese for 'guy who can't, so he teaches.'"

Rey starts to smirk at Solo as she sets Poe’s glass on the work surface. “I see. So, Professor, what is it that you  _ can’t _ ?”

Poe looks positively gleeful. “Let me answer this one,” he says, but Solo reaches out with one hand like a claw, as if threatening to choke him. “Or maybe not –”

It’s this moment that Finn chooses to return from the cellar, a mop in one hand and a wet floor sign in the other. “Oh sweet baby Rey,” he sings as the door bangs shut behind him, “we have a code red in the basement.”

*

“Jesus, you Skywalkers have no sense of humor,” Poe says. “Come on, let’s get a table.”

“Your old man back can’t handle the stools, huh,” says Ben, sliding off of his and shouldering his messenger bag. “Look how old you’ve become.”

“Don’t make me tell her all your weaknesses,” Poe retorts, pointing toward Rey, who is getting a damage report from her coworker – Finn, he thinks his name was – about the flooding basement. Ben is trying not to eavesdrop, trying to turn his attention away from her completely, but the bell-like pitch of her voice seems to cut through all the background noise. He thinks that even in a crowded street he could pick out the sound of her laugh instantly. He’s heard it often enough in the past week, as she cuts up with friends and patrons up at the bar.

He follows Poe on autopilot as he leads the way to a table. “So how did you find this place?” Poe asks. “It’s definitely not the kind of dive I’d imagine Kylo Ren hanging out in. I’d expected more oysters on the half shell and eighteen-dollar cocktails named after Hemingway short stories.”

“Nowhere in Takodana can you get a single cocktail for eighteen dollars,” Ben says. Across the room he sees Rey disappear down into the basement with an extension cord while Finn takes over the bar.

“There’s that place under the Dreadnought Hotel – what’s it called, that pretentious little speakeasy–”

He doesn’t know why he’s chosen this place as his base of operations outside his office. It’s dark, except where the hideous Christmas lights are twinkling overhead; it has a persistent smell of overheated grease; the draft list is short and unexciting. The city has plenty of objectively  _ better  _ watering holes.

But – for a while at least, he thinks as they find their seats – it felt like a place he could carve out for himself. A little oasis.

He hadn’t thought about that when he brought the grad students in for a post-seminar drink. Hadn’t thought about that what he liked about the place was how it seemed so untouched by the academic sphere that consumed the city. He wishes now that he’d bothered to examine the  _ why _ of his attraction to the place, because now here he was, trying to keep up his end of the conversation with Poe while worrying that Poe would make the place his new  _ thing _ . Something about the thought troubles him more than it should.

“Ben. Seriously.”

“What?” It came out sharper than he intended, judging by the dubious look on Poe’s face.

“I was  _ saying, _ ” Poe groused, “that I saw an article this morning about First Order narrowing down their choices for new chief executive producer.”

Distantly, Ben is slightly impressed by the swiftness with which his mental guards crash into place. He feels the clenched fist of panic around his stomach for a single, nauseating instant, before it vanishes behind the bulwark of his detachment. He  _ does not care. _

“It’s taken them long enough,” Poe says, still watching Ben, apparently gauging his reaction and judging him amenable to continued conversation. “If they wait any longer, the interim guy is gonna run ‘em into the ground.”

Ben scoffs out loud. “Domaric Quinn is a philistine. He wouldn’t recognize artistic merit if it bit him in the ass.  _ All  _ he cares about are the quarterly earnings reports. He’d use algorithm-generated scripts if enough data suggested they would yield a higher domestic gross.”

“So he said some nasty things about your work, I take it,” says Poe, sipping his beer, all innocence and arched eyebrows.

“Oh, fuck off.”

Poe leans forward, looking earnest, almost somber; Ben’s almost impressed, as it’s not an expression that typically crosses his face. “Look, I know it’s personal for you, I’m not trying to be an asshole.”

“It must come naturally, then.” Ben smirks but there’s no warmth to it. From the open basement door he hears a sound that it takes him a second to recognize – a shop vac roaring to life.

“I don’t know all the details –”

“You really don’t.”

“– but I know  _ you  _ delivered the killing blow,” Poe presses on. “So to speak.”

Ben chews on the inside of his cheek.  _ I wish I had,  _ he thinks. But he doesn’t respond.

“Because of you, Snoke is where he is,” Poe says. “That’s gotta count for something.”

Poe, being Poe, had to push it. It was always the chief sore spot between them; Poe never knew when to quit, and Ben never could resist rising to his bait. When they were teenagers, their sparring had been uglier and physical. There are still moments like these that Ben finds his fists wishing to leave a mark on Poe’s face. He resists the urge, though, if only because under all the needling and mischief, Poe’s kindness makes Ben wishes he deserved it.

“Snoke’s holed up in his tacky playboy mansion in the hills,” Ben says quietly, “betting the statute of limitations will run out before his bank balance does. There was no  _ killing blow.  _ You know how many of those lawsuits he’s settled out of court already? Eight. Eight out of eleven.”

Poe looks pained. “That’s not on you.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“Except what I’ve read in the news,” Poe says, “because you –”

At that moment, all the lights go out, including the multicolored Christmas lights. 

“Jesus,” Ben says, joining the chorus of voices protesting the sudden total darkness. And it’s not just the lights, he realizes: the music – some inoffensive roots mix – and the sound of the shop vac in the basement have also stopped.

“Power outage?” Poe’s voice comes from his right.

There’s an unintelligible yell from the basement, Rey calling up the stairs; Finn hollers back to her, or maybe the establishment at large, that he’s got a light somewhere. Somewhere in the room, a patron turns on their cellphone like a flashlight and others follow suit, including Poe.

“Well, this is dramatic,” says Poe, his face lit from beneath in ghostly blue. “No wonder you like it here.”

“Probably just tripped the circuit breaker,” says Ben.

Poe is silent a moment, and then he says, “Do you think either of those kids knows how to reset a breaker?”

Ben doesn’t need more of an excuse to extract himself from this conversation. Without further discussion, he shoves his chair back and heads for the basement, phone screen leading the way past the wet floor sign Finn had set up in the main walkway. His thoughts immediately go to more dire explanations for the blackout: damaged extension cord in standing water. Suddenly he’s less concerned with fleeing Poe’s irritating questions and much more concerned with the situation in the basement.

Finn tries to intercept him on his way. “Hey man, you can’t go down there –”

Ben ignores him, takes the steps two at a time until he gets to the bottom.

The cellar is a one-room unfinished… cave. Cobwebby storage shelves packed with cleaning supplies and jars of nuts and preserves line two of the walls, in addition to a massive deep-freezer perched on a couple of two by fours. A keg fridge big enough to hold four kegs stands at the bottom of the steps, and more kegs sit on top of it.

“Thank goodness, Finn, here, bring me the torch –”

And there is Rey, evidently unharmed, groping along the wall in the dark. Behind her the shop vac sulks silently, hose drooping in a big puddle that’s spreading from the west foundation wall. He feels relief rush through him at the sight of her, which is strange because he hadn’t even realized how high his anxiety had climbed in the last ten seconds. He comes toward Rey, shining the light from his screen on the damp floor. “Are you okay?” he asks, and –

– she yelps and  _ whirls _ around. He catches a look of genuine fear on her face in the split second before she trips over the shop vac and careens backward.

He follows her instinctively, lunging forward to grab her arm. But she’s so  _ small  _ – it feels like there’s nothing to her, and he drops his phone, grabs her other arm and overcorrects, yanking her up and against him. In the sudden darkness he hears the shop vac lurch away on its little casters and crash against a keg fridge.

“Fuck, sorry,” he blurts. His heart is pounding like he just ran a six-minute mile. 

“D - Professor?” Her breath comes hot against his throat.

“Are you okay?” He’s having a hard time just unclenching his fists. Her wrists are so slender in his grip.

“I  _ was _ – what are you  _ doing  _ down here?”

“Are you – can I – ”

He doesn’t know if he wants to apologize or snarl at her or – or even something more inane. She’s panting in short breaths, adrenaline clearly still spiking.

“ _ Rey? _ ” Finn’s voice cuts through, calling down the stairwell. He feels her jolt in his grip as if shocked by a mild electric current. “Are you okay?”

Rey immediately yells back, “I’m fine!”

And at the same time, Ben calls, “We’re fine! We’re all fine here. Now. Thank you.”

There’s a long pause. Ben – he’s holding his breath, and he can tell that Rey is too, her slight, warm body completely rigid against his. She’s wearing a tissue-thin tee – cream? Tan? He can’t remember, can’t see it in the dark, but it does nothing to disguise the rough texture of her lace bra where she’s pressed to his chest.

_ Oh, shit.  _ Heat blows through his cheeks, and elsewhere.

Finally they hear Finn respond: “Okay, then!” Followed by the sound of footsteps moving away from the cellar door.

And then Rey bursts out laughing.

It startles him enough that he drops her wrists, but – her hand fists in his shirt, and she’s laughing so hard she starts to droop against him. He still can’t see a fucking thing, but he hooks his elbow under her arm, hand curled around her shoulder blade, and she  _ clings _ to him, shaking with laughter. It’s infectious – ringing peals of giggles, high and bright and clarion, and maybe it’s just a natural reaction to the sudden tension and release, but it’s the most joyful sound he thinks he’s ever heard.

He wishes he could see her face.

“It’s really fucking dark down here,” he mutters, and that just sets her off  _ more. _ His face is so hot it might serve as a light source. “Do you mind if I – no, you’re good, let me just get my phone.”

She lets him go but he hangs onto her arm, he supposes so he doesn’t lose track of her in the dark while he bends down to search for his phone. Mercifully, it didn’t fall in the puddle, and a press of his thumb wakes up the screen.

“I just came looking for the breaker box,” he says as they adjust to the light. He realizes it’s probably weird to continue holding onto her, so he releases her arm, albeit reluctantly. “Thought… maybe you could use some help finding it.”

“I know where it is,” she says breathlessly, voice still full of laughter. She starts across the room and beckons for him to follow; he obeys, holding up his phone to illuminate her path as she locates the box mounted on the wall across the main room of the cellar. “A fat lot of good it’ll do me, though. It’s a fuse, not a breaker.”

Ben frowns, both at her explanation and at her tone. “I bet I can fix it,” he says as she pops open the fuse box.

“Not if you don’t have a spare fuse, you can’t,” she says. She wrinkles her nose at the smell of melted filament. “This system is ancient. We’ve blown fuses left and right since I arrived.”

Ben runs a hand through his hair. “It sounds like an electrical fire waiting to happen. How the hell….”

“I’m just an auto mechanic slash bartender, don’t ask me,” she says, a touch dryly.

“I mean,” he tries again, trying to keep some of the incredulity out of his voice, “if they blow that often, why don’t you keep replacements around?”

“Maz usually has spares, but I used the last one a week ago and she hasn’t restocked yet.”

“You could….” He trails off, wishing for the first time in his life he’d paid more attention when his dad tried to teach him something about electrical repair on the  _ Falcon. _

But Rey is way ahead of him. She’s already removed the blown fuse and holds it up to his light, turning it to examine the cloudy glass. “Swap it with a good fuse from one of the other circuits? Unfortunately this fuse is the only one in the box with this amperage. I guess most of the lights and outlets in the main room are powered through it? If I’d known, I would’ve run the extension cord from the kitchen instead of under the bar.” She sighs. “Anyway, I need to call my boss. It figures the one night she’s out of town is when the shit hits the fan. Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s cold and far too damp and –” her eyes glitter with mischief – “really fucking dark.”

He follows her up the stairs, where she grabs her phone from the sideboard and makes a call. In the main room of the bar, there’s laughter and chatter, as though the power outage has generated a particularly festive mood; a handful of patrons are clustered around the bar, wielding phones like flashlights while Finn sweats and makes change for them, but none of them seem to be in a hurry.

“I know, Maz – but the new ones haven’t arrived yet. Mmhm. Are you sure? I can go over to Maynard’s and get a replacement.” Rey, a finger in one ear and her phone on the other, conducts her phone call at the end of the bar. “I mean, it’s your bottom line. And your cellar….”

Ben knows there’s no way he’s pulling off “subtle,” standing with his arms stiff at his sides like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster and  _ hovering. _

“Well, no, the flooding’s not  _ that  _ bad,” Rey concedes. “It’s not like you have to worry about drywall.”

“What’s the story?”

Ben starts – he had been so focused on Rey that he hadn’t noticed Poe come up behind him, their pint glasses in his hands.

But then Rey concludes her phone call and turns to address the group. “So, folks, looks like we’re closing early. If you have cash, settle up with Finn. We should be open again tomorrow at our normal hours.”

“You’re kicking us out?” Poe calls.

“Yep. Feel free to finish your drinks first, but then it’s closing time.”

Poe looks up at Ben. “Welp. You heard the girl. Get chugging.” He pushes Ben’s glass into his hands.

It takes a little while for the other patrons to get processed. Rey disappears in the kitchen and for a minute Ben wonders, heart sinking, if she just left. But to his relief she returns at about the same time he’s handing cash over to Finn. She comes out around the bar and leans against it next to him.

“Hey. Thanks again for earlier,” she says to him, a hand on one hip.

Ben’s mouth quirks in a half smile. “For what? Moral support?”

She doesn’t say anything, but she –  _ winks at him.  _ It’s not anything particularly sly or seductive – in fact, it’s a little hammy – but it still… does things to him.

This is  _ really not okay. _

He clears his throat. He can only blame his next words on the sudden exit of blood from his brain to lower places.

“Can I give you a ride home?”

She peers up at him and he notices there’s a smudge of something on her cheek. Grime, maybe, from handling the shop vac. He realizes that she’s going to turn him down again, and while before it didn’t matter one way or another – now he feels the urge to explain himself. Finn tries to hand him his change and he waves him off.

Rey purses her lips as if she’s deliberating. “I’ve got my bike, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s still raining,” he says. He doesn’t need a window to tell; the sound of the rain on the roof is a dull roar. “Visibility’s terrible – and this town is  _ not _ as bike-friendly as it likes to pretend.” Because cyclists are a scourge on roads which were never designed for vehicle traffic. He’s terrorized his fair share of them in the past, which wouldn’t have particularly shamed him to admit before.

She looks away from him, doubt on her face. “I don’t know….”

Ben stares at her as if willing her to meet his eyes again. “Let me. So I can make up for scaring you down there.”

At that, her smile breaks through like sun through clouds and she hums in amusement. “Well,” she says, “when you put it that way…. Just this once wouldn’t hurt, I suppose.”

Poe chooses that moment to come up alongside them, shaking out his rain poncho so water droplets scatter all over the floor. “You’re not gonna offer  _ me _ a ride home?” he asks, one eyebrow cocked infuriatingly as he glances between Ben and Rey.

“I’d think I’d rather see you put that stupid poncho on again,” Ben says, warning in his voice despite his better effort to control himself.

“Relax, bud,” Poe laughs. “Rey? Nice meeting you. Good luck with the, ah.” He twirls his finger at the ceiling. “Okay, I’m off to brave the elements.”

As Poe makes his exit, Rey whips into action. “Let me run a mop over the floor and then I’ll be ready to go. Sorry – you don’t actually have to wait if you don’t want –”

But Finn cuts in smoothly. “I’ll do the floors, peanut. You get home.”

Rey bites her lip. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go get your stuff and get out of here.”

Rey doesn’t waste time, and in a minute she’s gathered up her ragged backpack and joined him at the door.

“Ready?” he asks anyway, and his heart leaps in his chest as she smiles up at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you later than I expected by a) conversations with Boomers about electrical engineering, b) a winter storm power outage at my house, and c) that one prof who always insists on driving me home when we go out.
> 
> If you enjoyed, leave a comment or even retweet the [moodboard here!](https://twitter.com/infraarad/status/1214683281213386752)
> 
> ALSO, if you are as frustrated by this slow burn as I am, check out the [filthy Fortnite AU I posted yesterday.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22438324) Hot Divorced Dad Ben Solo / babysitter Rey / video games. 😘


	4. Chapter 4

Outside, the rain is coming down like chair legs. Ben’s umbrella is big, one of those golf umbrellas that could comfortably shelter the average American nuclear family, but there’s nothing  _ comfortable  _ about the way his student is pressing into his side. She’s not actually clinging to him, but she trots so close that her shoulder is bumping his elbow every other stride.

So it’s a little baffling when, not thirty seconds after they leave the bar, she says, “I love the rain.”

He glances down. “Is that why you don’t carry an umbrella?” he says, but as she meets his gaze, eyes startled and wide, he realizes she didn’t take it as a joke.

“Sorry, I just -- sorry!” Rey says, flushing red up to her hairline as she takes a step sideways, giving him space at the expense of her shelter from the rain. “I just assumed --”

But he stops, grabs her by the upper arm, halting her a little more shortly than he meant to. “No, you’re -- it’s fine!” he says, drawing her back under the umbrella. “Please.” He releases her arm.

She looks up at him through her lashes. “I really didn’t mean to presume,” she says quietly.

“Rey, don’t,” he says, feeling possibly as embarrassed as she looks. “Come on. My car’s right around the corner.”

He goes for light and breezy, which is as false on him as a blond wig, but he hopes she doesn’t notice. And if she does, she at least decides to play along, tucking her cool little hand into the bare crook of the elbow he offers, falling in step beside him again. But this time she maintains a respectful distance between them, her hand light on his skin, like a bird about to take flight any moment. It’s ten times more awkward and distracting than before.

Still, somehow he’s both relieved and aggravated when they get to his car, and she removes her hand and shoves it into the pocket of her jeans.

“A Volvo S90,” she remarks. “Didn’t know college professors made that kind of cash.”

He arches an eyebrow at her. “They don’t,” he says, opening the passenger side door for her and keeping her covered by the umbrella until she’s safely inside, her backpack shoved down in the footwell.

When he joins her inside and starts the car up, she hums softly to herself. “I see. So this is from your previous job,” she says. “The mysterious industry.”

He lets the car purr for a moment and out of the corner of his eye sees her smooth her hand over the black leather of the seat cushion. “Do you want the seat heater on?” he asks, flicking the windshield wipers. They start to rock back and forth, the motors whisper-quiet, almost drowned out by the sound of the rain on the roof.

“No. Sooo what industry were you in? I mean, I’m guessing film.”

He finds himself biting the inside of his cheek, a bad habit he was never able to break. In times of great stress, he had occasionally damaged the inside of his mouth so severely that he sometimes had trouble eating. His dentist’s horror during a routine checkup impressed upon him that it was  _ not normal. _

So when Ben relaxes his jaw, it’s slowly and deliberately, and his answer is the same. “You guess correctly.”

She makes a fascinated little hum that sounds ridiculously delighted and he winces. It’s the kind of sound that usually precedes a litany of questions. And indeed -- “What did you do? I mean I’m guessing you weren’t an actor.”

He  _ bristles _ at that. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Of course he doesn’t need to ask -- the answer comes to him instantly. He  _ knows _ he’s weird-looking, ghoulishly proportioned, his face too long, his chin crooked, too marred by freckles and moles, split in half by that dramatic scar. To say nothing of his ears -- the less said of them, the better.

He knows. But it’s still  _ infuriating -- _

“Because,” she unwittingly interrupts his seething hate spiral, apparently oblivious to it, “I can’t imagine you quitting being an actor, if that’s what you were. I guess teaching is a kind of acting.” She hums to herself again, this time thoughtfully. “Maybe you  _ are _ an actor. Researching a role. What do you think, did I guess right this time?”

He can’t even begin to follow that train of thought. He barely knows what station it stopped at.

Not for the first time lately, he remembers how it was when he was a student. How his classmates entertained themselves by speculating on their professors’ lives outside of class. If they were married. Where they might live. Whether they were dog or cat people. What they did in their free time.

It’s strange, and not altogether comfortable, imagining Rey playing that game with her friends. Talking about him like that. Like he’s a specimen on display.

“I am not nor have I ever been an actor,” he says. Carefully. Still tense.

She glances over at him. “Do you want me to keep guessing? I can keep guessing.”

He smiles in spite of himself. “Speaking of guessing, where am I taking you?”

“Oh. Uh.” She falters. “Campus,” she says.

“One of the dorms?” he asks, pulling out of his parking spot. The anger is fading, swallowed up by sheepishness.

“Actually, if you could drop me off at the library...?”

He glances at her. “Little late for studying, don’t you think?”

“When would you suggest I study, Professor Solo?” she says lightly, but there’s an unmistakable sharpness in her voice that he didn’t expect. “During job one or job two? Maybe during lecture? Or I could just stop sleeping altogether.”

“Christ, point made, Student Johnson,” he says, feeling shitty and guilty and irritated and, if he’s being honest with himself, a little bit aroused by her sarcasm.

This evening has been filled with unexpected developments, he thinks.

They drive in silence for a while. It’s only about a mile and a half to campus, but Ben seems to be catching every single red light on the way. Next to him, Rey peers out the window, clearly to avoid talking to him, because it’s too dark out to actually see anything. At one intersection, as they sit waiting for the light to turn green, Ben studies her out of the corner of his eye. She’s curled up, one leg tucked under the other, and in the red light her bare skin looks ethereal. He wishes he could see her face, hear her thoughts.

Not for the first time, Ben wonders if he’ll ever learn to have a fucking conversation without jamming his entire size thirteen foot in his mouth.

He clears his throat. “Python wrangler,” he says.

She whips around to look at him. “Do what now?”

“Python wrangler,” he says, a little louder this time. “My secret industry job.”

“Python… wrangler,” she says.

“Mm-hm.”

“As in… wrangler of… of pythons. You….” She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re bullshitting me.”

He smirks. “Honest to god.”

She starts to grin. “You are such a  _ liar. _ ”

He has to bite his lip to keep from laughing. He doesn’t respond -- doesn’t want to risk fucking it up again, because he really likes the way she’s looking at him, like she’s trying to puzzle him out. Wants her to keep looking at him like that, if at all possible.

He’s totally bullshitting her, though.

A minute passes and something tense and quiet with it, “I revised my paper,” she says out of the blue. “I managed to get to the writing center to have them look over it and I resubmitted it yesterday.”

Outside the car, the lights of the engineering building glide past. “Wow. I think you may be the first student I’ve known who’s taken a paper to the writing center,” he says.

She shrugs. “I know my strengths. Writing isn’t one of them.”

“That’s not true.” It just kind of pops out of him and he clears his throat, aware of her sidelong glance as he stops at the red light. “You lack technical finesse, yes. It’s obvious you’re untrained. But that can be easily corrected. What  _ isn’t _ easy are ideas. Spotting connections and understanding their significance. Communicating the core of them.” Ben twists his hands on the steering wheel, takes a breath. “You’re stronger than you know. You need a teacher.”

She doesn’t respond. He looks over at her and sees her watching him with the strangest expression, her eyes wide and almost alarmed, her lips parted, as if she was going to say something, but she caught herself mid-breath. 

A driver behind them leans on their horn and startles Ben out of his distraction.

“Arright, you fuckin’ SHITHEEL,” he exclaims as he stomps on the gas. The car lurches forward so violently that Rey seizes the door handle to brace herself.

The haze of red fades almost instantly, replaced by mortification. He can’t bring himself to apologize or even look at her, and he spends the rest of the ride staring ahead, trying to marshall his emotions and funnel away his rage at the driver who interrupted. 

They arrive at the library and he pulls up as close as the curb allows. Without even thinking about it, he insists she take his umbrella, reminding her that  _ she _ still has to walk home after her late-night study session and that it’s supposed to rain all night. He’s surprised by how effective an argument this is, because she seems to require no further convincing.

She almost forgets her bag in her scramble out of the car.

*

**From: ** Rey Johnson < rj8846@tsu.edu >  
**Sent: ** Monday, September 16, 20--, 2:14 am  
**To: ** Ben Solo < solob@tsu.edu >  
**Subject: ** thanks

_ Professor, _

_ Thanks again for the lift to campus and the umbrella. I’ll try to remember to bring it back on Tuesday. _

_ Rey _

**From: ** Ben Solo < solob@tsu.edu >  
**Sent: ** Monday, September 16, 20--, 2:19 am  
**To: ** Rey Johnson < rj8846@tsu.edu >  
**Subject: ** Re: thanks

_ Student, _

_ I’m assuming you got home safe then? _

_ You can hold on to the umbrella. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been slowly pilfering umbrellas from the FAB lost and found and have built up quite a collection. _

_ Ben _

_ Sent from my iPhone _

**From: ** Rey Johnson < rj8846@tsu.edu >  
**Sent: ** Monday, September 16, 20--, 2:28 a.m.  
**To: ** Ben Solo < solob@tsu.edu >  
**Subject: ** Re: re: thanks

_ Ben, _

_ I guess sharing such a deep, dark secret justifies a first name basis. _

_ Rey _

**From: ** Ben Solo < solob@tsu.edu >  
**Sent: ** Monday, September 16, 20--, 2:31 am  
**To: ** Rey Johnson < rj8846@tsu.edu >  
**Subject: ** Re: re: re: thanks

_ Now you have the real dirt on me. Use it wisely. _

_ Sent from my iPhone _

*** **

“What does that even  _ mean? _ ” Rey asks, and she looks up from the cutting board to see Rose treating her to the most withering look she’s ever been on the receiving end of. Worse: Finn, sitting next to her on the opposite side of the kitchen island, is wearing the exact same expression.

Once again, Rey finds herself almost wishing she’d never introduced the pair.

“Stop judging me with your eyes,” she warns. “Or I’ll eat all of this myself. You both know I’m capable of it.”

“That and so much worse,” Finn says, and Rey tosses a piece of onion at him, which he dodges easily.

Finn’s place is in the run-down east campus neighborhood where grad students and upperclassmen live, where most of the construction is pre-war but the rent is low. The unit is the top floor of what used to be a single-family dwelling, basically a studio with a bathroom the size of a post-it note. The room is done up in heinous wood veneer paneling, the carpet is nubby and threadbare in places, and the popcorn ceiling is stained yellow from decades of previous tenants’ cigarette smoke, but otherwise Finn keeps the place nearly immaculate.

“So ungrateful. And after I’ve come all this way, with my hard-earned groceries.”

“You were literally just bragging about how you scored those peppers in a dumpster dive,” Finn says.

“Dumpster diving is work _ ,  _ you nit,” Rey laughs. “Ever tried to get into a dumpster? Ever tried to get  _ back out  _ of a dumpster?”

Finn throws his hands up in defeat as Rey splits open one of the aforementioned peppers. “Alright, okay, jeez. I bow to the dumpster queen.”

“Yeah you do,” Rey says.

“Hold up,” Rose commands, and Rey tenses.

Usually, these dinners at Finn’s -- well, they’ve become the highlight of her week. She has been cooking at Finn’s apartment for months now. It started over the summer when Maz pushed sacks of tomatoes from her garden on both of them. Finn had no idea what to do with them, and Rey had suggested they make tomato sauce. Since she didn’t have access to a kitchen with a proper stove, Finn invited her to take over his _ . _ An exquisite tomato sauce, fragrant with basil and oregano and a touch of sugar, had been the result, and when she served some of it up with buttered spaghetti noodles, Finn had practically swooned.

Since then, Rey has spent at least one evening a week in the little kitchen area, cooking up massive one-pot meals that yield leftovers for days. What started as an arrangement of convenience became a ritual she relies on to keep her grounded.

But Rose joined them tonight, and the changed dynamic has left Rey feeling a little like a fish out of water again. Of course, Rey  _ likes _ Rose. But there’s something about the look in Rose’s eyes -- the one she’s fixing her with right now, for example, that painfully keen look that makes Rey want to squirm.

“Can we go back to the email thing?” Rose says. “Professor Pervy Eyes? Deep dark secrets? Hello?”

“Hey, yeah,” Finn exclaims.

“I mean let’s back it up a sec,” Rose says, “I’m still shook that not only did he give you a ride home but he  _ has been offering  _ to. Like when were you planning on sharing this info?”

Rey frowns. “I’m sharing it now,” she says. 

“A week after the fact,” Rose points out.

The piquant green scent of the bell pepper fills her nostrils. “Because it’s not a thing. There’s no need to make it into a thing. It’s all been very casual.”

“Casual like emails back and forth at two in the morning casual?” Rose says, smirking as she taps the blank screen of Rey’s phone where it sits on the countertop. “Yep, you’ve convinced me.”

Rey sets the knife down and turns around to the stove behind her to get her frying pan set up, and to hide her blush. “You literally know everything I know,” she says. “You know him better than I do, Rose.” She dashes oil into the cast iron and turns on the flame. 

“I really don’t though,” says Rose. “That’s why this is so weird.”

Rey pivots on her heel to face them again. “Could you hand me the mushrooms?”

Finn passes them over without a word, raptly hanging onto every word of their conversation.

“Sure, I had a class with him,” Rose says as she watches Rey open up the carton, “but never once did he offer me or anyone else in there a ride anywhere. I mean, we all knew him as the prof who was totally and completely inaccessible, unless you had a question about jump cuts or something. Poe? Super chill, fun guy, definitely the kind to bring in donuts for the class for the final. Ben Solo? Looks at you like he wants to scrape you off his shoe if you dare pronounce _mise en __scène_ the wrong way.”

“Well, it’s different,” Rey shrugs. A mushroom makes a break for it and she lunges to catch it before it wobbles off the counter. “I knew him before I even knew he was a professor.”

Rose purses her lips. “Hmm,” she says, sounding unconvinced. “Maybe.”

“What’s  _ mise en  _ _ scène _ ?” Finn asks.

“The way everything in a shot is staged,” Rose says. “Set, props, lighting, actors, et cetera.”

“Nerd,” Finn says.

Rey tosses the onions into the skillet along with a spoonful of minced garlic from a jar. When she turns back around, Rose has a thoughtful look on her face.

“You know, he’s not all that bad looking,” she observes. Rey feels her cheeks blaze with heat, bends her head over the cutting board to hide behind her hair, but then Rose is  _ hooting _ with glee. “Look at that blush!”

“Like a little English rose,” Finn grins.

“Oh my god, do not,” Rey says, both annoyed and amazed at them. “Not all that bad looking?” she demands, laughing and incredulous at the same time as she chops mushrooms into even slices.

“Yeah, not all that bad looking,” Rose says, punctuating each word with a wave of her hand that doesn’t clarify anything.

Rey snorts. “That’s… not exactly flattering,” she says.

“I said what I said,” Rose intones. Then she props her chin up on her fists and raises an eyebrow. “Unless you have something you wanna say? You know, in his defense?”

Rey rolls her eyes. Finn can barely contain himself.

“He’s a grown man, he can defend himself,” Rey says archly. “Now, if you’re  _ quite  _ finished….”

Rose drops it, but not without a smirk.

Rey finishes up the stir-fry and they gather on the floor around the coffee table, the only flat surface large enough for all three plates and the game board. Tonight it’s Settlers of Catan, since it’s one that needs three people at least for a proper game and Rey and Finn have been dying to play it. Things are less awkward with the game to distract them. 

“So when is the bar supposed to open again?” Rose asks toward the end of their first game. Finn groans theatrically, and Rey compresses her lips.

“Maz brought in an electrician,” Finn says, “and Thursday he basically declared the whole place a death trap. We’re shut down until they can do some major rewiring.”

“Whoa, so are you like… out of a job until then?” Rose asks.

Finn shrugs. “I mean, I’ve got my Uber gig so it could be worse. But drunk college students are not the best tippers.”

Rose glances over at Rey. “Good thing you have Plutt’s, I guess,” she says.

“I guess,” says Rey. “He’s certainly not short on work. He’s just an asshole.”

“Well, Maz’s place’ll be back up and running again before you can blink,” says Rose. “Which means, I guess, that Professor Solo will also be back asking you if you need a ride.” She waggles her eyebrows suggestively.

“It’s  _ Ben  _ now, though, isn’t it _ , _ ” Finn says. 

“Shut it, both of you,” says Rey, but without any heat to it.

“Rey, you have  _ the real dirt on him  _ now,” Finn says. “It would be criminal not to exploit that.”

Rey fiddles with a pair of little orange wood game markers that she has yet to place on the board. “You give truly dreadful advice.”

“In my defense, I have never claimed to be a voice of reason or restraint,” says Finn.

A clatter of dice, and: “Aha! A seven,” Rose crows, then moves the little wooden figure to a new tile. “Gonna rob you blind, Johnson.”

“You and the rest of Takodana,” Rey mutters, holding up her hand so Rose can steal a card. Rose manages to steal her one brick.

It’s late by the time they wrap up. Rey gets the feeling that Finn and Rose want to keep playing, but she tells them she has to get to bed early because of her eight a.m. thermodynamics course. It’s not a lie. But the entire evening has been exhausting, much more so than it feels like it should’ve been, and so she puts away the leftovers in Finn’s fridge.

Finn gives her a firm hug just outside the door, and Rose follows suit before excusing herself to Finn’s bathroom. Rey thanks Finn for hosting, unlocks her bike from the wrought-iron railing at the top of the stairs, and carries it down to the street.

She checks her phone before she hops on her bike and sees that she’s missed a call from Plutt. Dread hits her like a bucket of ice water.

It’s not difficult to feign nonchalance in front of Finn and Rose. But privately, she’s been doing her best not to panic since Maz called to let her know that she’d be dropping her shifts for the foreseeable future. Yes, she can fall back on hours at the garage -- god knows Plutt has plenty of work for her to do. But she’s loath to give Plutt any more leverage over her than he already has, and if she asks him for more hours, he’ll know she  _ needs  _ it.

She dials her voicemail, standing on the sidewalk and rolling her bike back and forth as she waits for the mechanical voice to give way to Plutt’s guttural rasp.


End file.
